The Oxford Handbook of The History of Medicine by Jackson, Mark, (ed.)

(Oxford University Press), 2011

672pp., £95, hard, ISBN 978-0-19-954649-7

In recent decades, the history of medicine has emerged as a vibrant focus of study within history and an area of vigorous debates about methods, themes, and sources.  The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine celebrates the richness and variety of global medical history.  Divided into three parts that consider periods, places and traditions and themes and methods, this handbook provides a constructive overview of the current state of these debates, and offers new directions for future scholarship. The essays, prescriptive, descriptive, or analytical, explore the methodological challenges and historiographical debates generated by working in particular periods.  They also examine the history of medicine in specific regions of the world and their medical traditions including discussion of the `global history of medicine'.  These essays are especially valuable as they take students into unfamiliar areas of medical history such as the Chinese traditions and medicine in Australasia.  The final section adopts broad chronological and geographical perspectives and  considers established and emerging historical themes and methodological debates in the history of medicine.  Not since Roy Porter's The Greatest Benefit to Mankind was published in 1997 has there been a better synoptic study of the history of medicine.   For those teaching Medcine at GCSE and Advanced Level, the essays should be essential reading.